I’ll be honest with you, I did not expect to ever like another Soen release. While their debut release was good, the following Tellurian was, I thought, to forever be the high water mark of their career. Lykaia, which succeeded it, attempted to go back to much of the atmospheric…

Warsaw’s Riverside return with their seventh studio album in Wasteland. Whereas 2015’s Love, Fear and the Time Machine sought to connect with sounds of progressive giants Ayreon and Opeth (who themselves are heavily influenced by the progressive music of the ’80s), Wasteland embraces something in between the progressive and psychedelic…

Listen: it’s no secret (because we choose not to make it a secret) that a vast majority of the writers and editors here at Heavy Blog belong to the left side of the political map. There are exceptions and there is variety; “the left” is not some monolithic, featureless plateau…

How to navigate the sheer number of festivals now available for the metal fan? With the aim of helping you sort through this vast variety, we’ve compiled the following primer. It’s by no means extensive; it’s simply impossible to write about all of the festivals we would have liked to mention. We focused on those we’ll be attending and on those who have the most attractive setlists in our eyes. That being said, do feel free to share more great festivals with us in the comments and please enjoy this, our selection of festivals for 2017.

So we’re doing a two-part series on picking the podcast’s official albums of the year 2016. We start with the blog’s list of 400+ albums that are worth consideration this year, whittle it down to 86 albums we care about, and then start cutting them. The objective is to get to a ranked list of 10 items and an overall list of 20 albums. We get down to about 45 this week until the cuts really start to hurt. This was real fun to do, so I hope you all enjoy too! The lists will be posted below.

As we mentioned in our previous installment, September and October are extremely busy times for major album releases. You can normally expect a good chunk of the albums near the top of people’s AOTY lists to come from these two months due to their late but not too late placement.…

Death is like a forest fire. In all aspects of life, it leaves behind it nothing but ash and the bitter taste of defeat. Our machinations at keeping it at bay are no less absurd then the sand lines of firemen, water bombs dropping from the heights of our pretenses on the uncaring flames of finality. But, as if this intro wasn’t loaded with enough cliches, forest fires are also forces of creating, leaving behind fertile soil in their wake. On this charred ground, new sprouts are given the opportunity to live and grow, brave explorers which, nonetheless, still carry the marks of past generations and live on in their relics. Riverside’s Eye of the Soundscape is all of these and more, a death knell, a wake and a celebration of life all rolled up into one. It’s one of the most powerful retrospectives in progressive rock and metal’s history, being a contemplation on a deep and expansive career.

Eden’s back! This means we get to talk about stuff like Tidal, other streaming services, this article about Opeth (which gets us pretty salty), the breakup of Bolt Thrower, Portnoy playing the 12 step suite he wrote for Dream Theater, inconsistencies in promos labels send to us, then new music or news from bands like Dark Tranquillity, Downfall of Gaia, Oathbreaker, Alcest, Metallica, A Sense of Gravity, the DOOM OST by Mick Gordon, Plini, Watchtower, Riverside, Pain of Salvation, Mithridatic and Venom Prison. Finally we talk about Elvenking’s underrated The Pagan Manifesto. Enjoy!

Meta-title! How metal of me to be very meta on a metal podcast that’s also pretty meta. This week we have a bunch of news. Either new releases, singles, teasers or whatever from: Inanimate Existence, Darkthrone, Wardruna, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Sinsaenum, Lamb of God, Voivod, Shokran, Dark Tranquillity, Thy Catafalque, Fit for An Autopsy, The Agonist, Disillusion, Exotype, Native Construct and Serpentine Dominion. Also an analysis of how global metal is, Pelagic Records’s starter kit, and a top 10 list of bands from Norway. While on the topic of top 10 lists, we do an impromptu “Top 10 songs that have the desired effect every time”. Or as Eden calls it, “Evergreen songs” or something. Whatever. Then we have our bullshit philosophy corner on Hegelian dialectics and the early metal scene! Finally, we talk about No Man’s Sky in the cool people section. Whew!

This week we don’t have a billion news items, thankfully! I was sick so I take the backseat a bit. We talk about Corey Taylor’s behavior at a show and also his comments about BLM, and Robb Flynn and Jesse Leach weigh in as well. That’s Slipknot, Machine Head and Killswitch Engage,…